Video human motion recognition using a knowledge-based hybrid method based on a hidden Markov model

Human motion recognition in video data has several interesting applications in fields such as gaming, senior/assisted-living environments, and surveillance. In these scenarios, we may have to consider adding new motion classes (i.e., new types of human motions to be recognized), as well as new training data (e.g., for handling different type of subjects). Hence, both the accuracy of classification and training time for the machine learning algorithms become important performance parameters in these cases. In this article, we propose a knowledge-based hybrid (KBH) method that can compute the probabilities for hidden Markov models (HMMs) associated with different human motion classes. This computation is facilitated by appropriately mixing features from two different media types (3D motion capture and 2D video). We conducted a variety of experiments comparing the proposed KBH for HMMs and the traditional Baum-Welch algorithms. With the advantage of computing the HMM parameter in a noniterative manner, the KBH method outperforms the Baum-Welch algorithm both in terms of accuracy as well as in reduced training time. Moreover, we show in additional experiments that the KBH method also outperforms the linear support vector machine (SVM).